Physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva on the practice of Right Attitude, or in Hindu terms, devotion to work without attachment to reward (nishkama karma):
“If you do anything with a narrow mindset, it makes you think according to a calculus of success and failure. Obviously when you are up against powerful interests, there are greater chances of failure than success. But when your work is inspired by a way of life and thinking, that process becomes a reward unto itself. That’s also what the Gita says, that you don’t count the results, you do the right thing according to your context. A spiritual outlook helps you see what the right thing in your context is. What matters is fulfillment, and that cannot be measured by the yardstick of society and its view of you, but by how your soul feels. Then the awards don’t matter, the brickbats don’t matter, the lousy rumors don’t matter. Nothing affects you.”
Hey Lila,
been reading your blog since I read about Language of Empire on the Dark Age Blog (no longer online…) and appreciated the text, as I was “tuned-out” of the period which you investigate…and is a solid investigation.
This selection is interesting in light of the Gita, which I have only read in translation…It clarifies the complex epic and philosophy of karma yoga. To relate with the Language of Empire, your discussion of the religious dimension was compelling. I’m not an orientalist, but a student of religions, so I’ll stop this thought here….
I would like to refer you to a critique of sports (cult) as concrete social (historical) phenomena which is one inspiration for my research which I linked as my website:
http://ljubodragsimonovic.wordpress.com/category/2-articles-in-english/ [and there are good videos as well]. I don’t know how sports plays out specifically in other countries; it’s such a major phenomenon of existing world, to understand the world we live in we also need to consider sports [first line of Philosophy of Olympism and Olympic Flame video]…..
Hi Brian –
Your critique of sports is insightful.
Sports is in fact an important part of ideology in the modern world.
I think I make the point in
a piece I wrote a while back called, “Witches and Bastards.”
Sports is intertwined with the mythology of masculinity and war in a very powerful way.
If you go back to the nineteenth century, you’ll find the same thing in the ideology of the public school, in which young Englishmen were incessantly inculcated.
Empire, manhood, sports (games)and brotherhood/espirit de corps are all bound up.
Kipling, Lewis Carroll, and Matthew Arnold, among others, have written about it…
Competitive sports are the very opposite of “games” (or “play,” as in Homo Ludens, man who plays, or creative man).
Thus, the Olympics are the forum in which a warlike spirit of nationalist rivalry is cultivated outside the battlefield…
I read the witches and bastards essay…and now I’m re-reading a book of Gandhi’s prayers in translation
“only grant that I may ever think of thy feet, more beautiful than the lotus during the rains”
I don’t know that prayer.
Very beautiful.
The image of the lotus feet recurs in Hindu devotional literature and has been compared to the imagery of the word as a fountain of living water in Christianity…
It’s very popular in contemporary Hindu and neo-Hindu art and literature as well. The English guitarist John McLaughlin of Mahavishnu fame composed a piece with the title, “On the Lotus Feet of the Lord” that is exceptional.
I wish Gandhi had been more of a libertarian, especially in economic matters, and not so influenced by the doukhoubors and a kind of world-denying asceticism/altruism of the kind Raja Rao criticizes in “Serpent and the Rope.”
But I like to blame that on the aftermath of imperialism and its pathologies.
You’re opposed to capitalism….which I suppose you take to mean state capitalism.
But are you also opposed to free markets?
I don’t see the two as identical at all.
I welcome people on the left to rethink this..and to rethink their vision of the state as savior.
For me, it is only the market – the true free market that can save us from corporate-statism.
Free market–free of injustice, repression, oppression…if that’s what you mean by the antithesis of corporate statism, I would agree with you mb. In the end it won’t be a thing to save us, but US (humans moving towards others, homo homini homo, humanizing nature and naturing humans)
another excerpt from his prayer which I found inspiring:
Gandhi says, thou art the seed in the tree and thou art the tree from the seed….
Brian –
The market cannot be blamed for human vices.
In fact, in my belief, it tames those vices and renders them more useful than they would be otherwise.
Greed unchecked is ugly. But greed that motivates us to work to fulfill the desires of our fellow man who then pays us is surely an improvement.
It might be ideal if we worked from love of work itself, but it is preferable that we work rather than idle.
In that sense, the market humanizes us…
long lines of car waiting for gas…families waiting at walmart to buy things they don’t need out of ‘duty’….these aren’t signs of life, but of a situation in which loneliness is plague.
the major work should be to preserve life, which is threatened by unbridled greed and it’s triplet-sisters racism and militarism (mlk’s ’67 speech), such that the survival of each living being is the basic condition for the survival of all.
Gandhi says, we are of earth earthy–if the earth is no, we are not. Did he foresee the wasteful destruction of life as we witness today?
In this situation, the necessary work is to make healthy living conditions and healthy people, which should replace destructive work. Humans need other humans, and this should be the basis of relations, not greed. rather than compromising, conceding, or idling, we should preserve life in the world.
What if the market is the vice? It’s certainly man-made….would this be a ‘thwarting’ of vices? or the tendency of its development?
Hi Brian –
I agree with much of what you said.
But here’s where I disagree:
1. The market isn’t man made in the way central planning is.
2. The market is an minutely adjusting pricing mechanism, which, while not perfect, has proven to be much more accurate than any command system of pricing.
3. Greed doesn’t equal the markets. Greed is a human vice that can, usually, be harnessed to the markets. That was Smith’s insight.
What people forget is that Smith also assumed a society that was ethically oriented.
4. It’s not the markets that are fault. They’ve been totally corrupted by state intervention and the ensuing cozy relationship between so-called private corporations and government.
Institutions have been captured..regulators have been captured.